Patrick Ouano

I write software, and lately most of that software has AI somewhere inside it — RAG pipelines, autonomous agents, chatbots that have to admit when they don't know something. What I like about the AI side isn't the models, it's that they force you to be honest about the edges: what happens when it guesses wrong, and who picks up the pieces.

Mostly, though, I build things because it's fun. A map that only uncovers itself when you actually walk somewhere. A Minecraft-themed app that turns a photo of your fridge into dinner. A Discord bot that turned club attendance into XP and ranks for 200+ members. The best projects I've worked on started as someone saying wouldn't it be funny if.

The other half of it is caring whether the thing survives. Six weeks in Cape Town as technical lead taught me that better than any class: we were building for tenants who live on WhatsApp, handing off to an organization with no engineers. Anything that needed a developer was going to quietly stop working the day we flew home.